Happiness in Modern America

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Charles Murray was honored at the AEI a few months ago, and he gave a talk about happiness in the context of modern America:

His talk hit on an interesting paradox of welfare programs aimed at the poor, that it affects the satisfaction of life for those who are most likely to gain life satisfaction via non-vocational activities, such as faith, family, and community. Most liberals see faith as authoritarian delusions, and family and community needs the responsibility of the government. That’s not horrible if you have an interesting job you are proficient at, but if you are merely a hard working mensch, your paths to a meaningful and satisfying life are taken away.

In Murray’s words — but with my emphasis:

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don’t get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché “nothing worth having comes easily”). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren’t many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something — good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith.
[...]
The sources of deep satisfactions are the same for janitors as for CEOs, and I also said that people needed to do important things with their lives. When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people — already has stripped people — of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, “I made a difference.”

Posted in Eric Falkenstein, Policy | No Comments »

Anscombe’s Quartet

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

If you’ve spent much time statistically analyzing data, you know that the same statistical measurements can reflect very different underlying distributions. F.J. Anscombe created four data sets, now known as Anscombe’s quartet, to demonstrate how the same means, variances, correlations, and even linear regression lines can come from data sets that are obviously different — if you bother to graph them and take a look:

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A Geopolitical Reading of History

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

George Friedman provides a geopolitical reading of history:

From the 15th century onwards, European powers collectively overwhelmed the world, creating the first truly global geopolitical system in human history, to the point where the fate of Australian Aborigines was determined by British policy in Ireland and the price of bread in France turned on the weather in Minnesota.

Europe simultaneously waged a 500-year-long civil war of increasing savagery, until the continent tore itself apart in the 20th century and lost its hold on the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a single European nation that could be considered a global power of the first rank.

Another unprecedented event took place a decade or so earlier. For 500 years, whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled Europe’s access to the world and, with it, global trade. By 1980, the geography of trade had shifted, so that the Atlantic and Pacific were equally important, and any power that had direct access to both oceans had profound advantages. North America became the pivot of the global system, and whatever power dominated North America became its centre of gravity. That power is, of course, the United States.

It is geography combined with the ability to exploit it that matters. The US is secure from attack on land or sea. It is vulnerable to terrorist attack but, outside of a nuclear exchange, faces no existential threat in the sense that Britain and France did in 1940–41, or Germany and Japan did in 1944–45. Part of its advantage is that, alone among the combatants, the US actually profited from the Second World War, emerging with a thoroughly modernised industrial base. But this itself can be traced to the country’s core geography. The fertility of the land between the Appa lachians and the Rocky Mountains, and the configuration of the country’s river system, drove an economic system in the 19th century that helped fund an economy which today constitutes between 25 and 30 per cent of global economic activity, depending on how you value the dollar.

Just as important, perhaps, is that while the population density of Japan is about 365 people per square kilometre and that of most European states between 100 and 300 per square kilometre, the US population density, excluding Alaska, is about 34 people per square kilometre. The US has room to grow and it manages immigration well. Its population is not expected to decline. It is the pre-eminent power not because of the morality of the regime, the virtue of its people or the esteem in which it is held, but because of Europe’s failures and changes in global trade patterns.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Wash your hands with Elmo!

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Wash your hands with Elmo! And sneeze into the bend in your arm:

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Farouk al-Kasim, a young Iraqi geologist from Basra, married a Norwegian girl he met while working in London — and that eventually led him down an amazing career path:

For all its uncertainties, al-Kasim’s journey to Norway had a clear purpose: he and his Norwegian wife, Solfrid, had decided that their youngest son, born with cerebral palsy, could only receive the care he needed there. But it meant turning their backs on a world of comforts. Al-Kasim’s successful career had afforded them the prosperous lifestyle of Basra’s upper-middle class. Now they would live with Solfrid’s family until he could find work, though he had little hope of finding a job as rewarding as the one he had left behind. He was not aware that oil exploration was under way on the Norwegian continental shelf, and even if he had known, it wouldn’t have been much cause for hope: after five years of searching, still no oil had been found.

But al-Kasim’s most immediate problem on arriving in Oslo that morning was how to fill the day: his train to Solfrid’s home town did not depart until 6.30pm. “I thought what I am going to do in these hours?” he says. “So I decided to go to the Ministry of Industry and ask them if they knew of any oil companies coming to Norway.”

He deposited his luggage and walked to the ministry, where he was received by a baffled official who told him to come back that afternoon. When he returned, expecting only an address list, several men were waiting for him. “They were keen to know what had I been doing, what kind of education I had, whom I worked for. Did I work as a petroleum engineer? Did I work as a geologist? What did I do?” His request for a list of possible employers had turned into an impromptu job interview. “They must have been absolutely desperate for expertise!” says al-Kasim. They were indeed. At the time of his surprise call, Norway’s oil administration numbered just three officials, all in their thirties and all learning essential parts of the job as they went along. Meanwhile, the North Sea exploration results were pouring in and required careful analysis. Al-Kasim must have looked like a godsend: a man rich in academic training and practical experience of the oil industry — and one in need of work.

And that’s how he became the Iraqi who saved Norway from oil:

Poor countries dream of finding oil like poor people fantasise about winning the lottery. But the dream often turns into a nightmare as new oil exporters realise that their treasure brings more trouble than help. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, one time Venezuelan oil minister, likened oil to “the devil’s excrement”. Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, his Saudi Arabian counterpart, reportedly said: “I wish we had found water.”

Such resignation reflects bitter experience of the way that dependency on natural resources can poison a country’s economic and political system. Inflows of hard currency push up prices, squeezing the competitiveness of non-oil businesses and starving them of capital. As a result, productivity growth withers (a phenomenon known as “Dutch disease” after the negative effects of North Sea gas production on the Netherlands). Meanwhile, the state institutions in charge of oil often become corrupt and evade democratic control. And oil-rich states almost invariably waste the income it brings, many ending their oil booms deeper in debt than when they started.

This is better understood today than it was 40 years ago. When al-Kasim arrived in Oslo, no one was worrying about how oil might challenge Norway — in part because they didn’t think any would be found. The Geological Survey of Norway had dismissed the possibility just 10 years earlier.

The politicians and senior bureaucrats had not caught oil fever. A serious mining accident had recently brought down a government, and most did not want to touch oil matters with a bargepole. “Everything I said was met with, ‘Oh, you think so? Mmm. Maybe. Let’s wait and see’,” al-Kasim recalls. “This characteristic saved Norway from the curse of oil: the fact that they are completely incapable of getting carried away by the oil dream. They were very sceptical — plain horse sense basically. They didn’t want to move until it was absolutely proven that it was the right time to act.”

His was a lonely, contrarian voice. After examining exploration results, he wrote a report that warned Norway was sleeping, that even though no one had found oil yet, it was only a question of time. And time was short: the country’s leaders needed to prepare Norway to become an oil nation, but they were doing nothing. “I was a constant reminder that they were doing everything wrong,” al-Kasim says pointedly. Only his closest colleagues would listen.
[...]
Norway’s state oil company, StatoilHydro, is internationally recognised as a competitive commercial player and one of the most environmentally and socially conscious ones to boot. Since 1996, every krone the government has earned from oil has gone into a savings fund, which now totals some £240bn — more than a year’s gross domestic product and equivalent to about £50,000 for each of Norway’s 4.8 million citizens.

The real achievement, in other words, was not finding oil but coping with its discovery. Norway faced the same dilemma as every other new oil producer with no experience of the industry: if you rely too much on private foreign companies, too little of the oil wealth benefits the country in the form of government revenue or economic development; if you go too far in the other direction, you risk a bloated, politicised oil sector that evades both accountability to the people and competitive pressures to be efficient.

A balance had to be struck. Al-Kasim recalls now that one thing was clear in the early 1970s: Norway would join an international trend towards significant state participation in the oil sector. The Labour government “wanted this to be the new impetus in Norwegian industry”, he says. “And for that to be done properly, according to a socialist, the state has to be in the driver’s seat.” Al-Kasim agreed with that view, and so landed the job of writing the nation’s blueprint for how it would organise its fledgling oil industry.

The office was no place for this work, al-Kasim and a colleague decided. So on a summer day in 1971, they left Oslo for the colleague’s cabin in the woods, where they spent what al-Kasim remembers as the most exciting work week of his life. They worked on the plan into the early hours, taking fishing trips “between the battles”, he recalls. By the time they came home, they had drafted a government white paper that was later presented to parliament and unanimously waved into law. This created the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, the oil industry regulator, and Statoil, the national oil company (now known as StatoilHydro).

The trick of the Norwegian model was to retain the private sector’s competitive drive and its expertise — which Norway sorely needed — by making sure that the regulator was independent enough to rein in the state oil company as well as its private-sector peers. This was not secured without a fight. Statoil, after all, was going to generate a lot of money — and very soon it did. Willy Olsen, a fast-talking former Statoil manager, says: “Statoil and the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate didn’t have the friendliest of relationships. The first 10 to 12 years, the institutions were very unbalanced — Statoil was much heavier. NPD had to fight to gain respect, and for that it needed enthusiasts with enough competence that they could not be dismissed.” That became al-Kasim’s mission — and his job for the next two decades — as the regulator’s director of resource management.

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Fun Facts from Why We Make Mistakes

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Eric Falkenstein shares some fun facts from Why We Make Mistakes:

  • There is a 1 in 1 million chance of finding a gun in an airport check.
  • People don’t remember names, as opposed to the jobs or families of a person.
  • 80% of calls to a corporate help desk are for lost passwords.
  • Simply changing pill colors from white to red and black makes them more distinctive.
  • People recall their specific grades in school with an upward bias.
  • Men report a median of 7 sex partners, women 4.
  • 84% of doctors thought others were biased by self interest, whereas only 16% thought they were biased by self interest.
  • The most common airplane accident is ‘controlled flight into terrain’, or flying a plane into the ground.
  • When asked to pick a movie viewed later, more choose highbrow movies; choosing movies now we choose lowbrow movies.
  • Being first on the ballot adds about 3% to a candidates vote.
  • As something becomes familiar, the more we tend to notice it less.
  • We see things not as they are, but as they ought to be.
  • Experts make mistakes expecting patterns that aren’t there.
  • Depressed people are realists, happy people are overconfident.
  • People learn more from summaries than from reading entire chapters.
  • A horse race handicapper does as well with 5 bits of information as having 10, 20, or 40, though his confidence increases with the number of information bits available.
  • Hope impedes adaptation. Someone with a potentially reversible colonostemy is more unhappy after 1 year than someone with a 1 year irreversible colonostemy.
  • When you are trying to make judgments about complex systems, things that are easily observed are overweighted.
  • Money does not improve efficiency of large organizations (ie, giving everyone more money).
  • Money does increase the ability of individuals to withstand discomfort in tests.

Posted in Economics, Eric Falkenstein | No Comments »

The Demystifying Adventures of the Amazing Randi

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

The demystifying adventures of the Amazing Randi are likely coming to a close — he’s 81 years old and fighting cancer. Here’s how he got started:

When Randi was 15, he heard of a preacher in his hometown of Toronto who claimed he could read minds. Randi had been reading every book he could find on magic and illusions, so he thought he could figure out what trick the preacher was using on his flock.

One Sunday morning, Randi watched the preacher set up a classic “one ahead” scam, using information obtained ahead of time to trick the crowd into believing he could read minds. Randi took the stage as he imagined his hero Houdini might have done and preached to the congregation about being duped, explaining the trick. He was immediately run out of the church.

Dissidence would become a regular reaction to Randi, who was born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in 1928. He describes himself as a quick learner but a bit of a rabble-rouser — he was once kicked out of his Sunday school class for heresy.

When he was 12, he stumbled into a matinee performance by famed magician Harry Blackstone Sr., who made a woman float in the air just feet from the stunned boy. “That got me,” Randi says. “That grabbed me, and it never let go. It’s still got a hold of my head right now.”

A year after the church incident, Randi was in a bicycle accident that left him in a full-body cast for 13 months. Randi figured that even confined to the cast, he could still perform at nightclubs as a mentalist. “In those days, they were paying me $70 a week,” he says. “Now that was a lot of Canadian dollars, I can tell you.” He decided he would make it clear at the end of every show that he was simply using illusions. But he was disturbed when audience members would insist he had paranormal powers — ironically ignoring the only bit of truth he’d spat out all night. People seemed to want to believe in the supernatural.

Before he graduated high school, Randi left town with the carnival, performing as “Prince Ibis.” At age 22, he pulled off a highly publicized escape from a Quebec City jail cell, a trick Houdini used to perform. A local newspaper dubbed him “L’étonnant Randi” — the Amazing Randi, “with an i at the end,” he says, “like Houdini.” For three decades, Randi toured the world by train, plane, and ship, headlining marquees from the Deep South to the Far East. He was bound in straitjackets and dangled over waterfalls; buried alive; and handcuffed and locked in an oversized milk jug.

But Randi could never shake the need to educate the naive. Working at nightclubs in East Asia, he learned new con-man techniques, and when he came back, he had a bug for debunking. In the 1960s, he hosted a radio show in New York in which he would, among other things, argue with astrologers (“Complete woo-woo,” he recalls) and confront chiropractors (“Three chiropractors, three completely different diagnoses”).

The height of his fame came when Johnny Carson invited him onto The Tonight Show. Carson had him back 37 times, and the two became good friends. “Johnny was a very skilled magician, very accomplished,” Randi says.

Living in northern New Jersey, Randi befriended other great American thinkers, including astronomer Carl Sagan and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Randi and Asimov would sing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes together deep into the night. “He had such a wonderful voice,” Randi remembers. Randi and Sagan would discuss their shared love of astronomy; Sagan helped name a comet after Randi.

Randi even played himself on an episode of Happy Days — he levitates Mrs. Cunningham, and in the final shot, he steals Fonzie’s patented “Ehhh.” At one point, Randi toured with Alice Cooper, cutting off the rock god’s head with a trick guillotine at the end of every show.

In the ’70s, Americans developed a new fascination with all things paranormal — crystals, Tarot cards, astrology parties. Randi found the trends disturbing; he was particularly irked by a young Israeli named Uri Geller, who said he could bend spoons with his mind and read the thoughts of strangers. Geller appeared on countless television shows and was featured in magazines in dozens of languages.

The degree to which people took Geller seriously bothered Randi. Reputable scientists from several labs studied “the Geller effect,” how brainwaves affect pliable metal. Those scientists no longer discuss those experiments. In 1987, Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, invited Geller to the floor of Congress to send positive brain waves to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The senator and the psychic later claimed at least partial success.

Randi tried to spread the message that Geller’s techniques were simple charlatan tricks, old Israeli shtick masked by a trustworthy voice and a warm smile. Randi performed Geller’s tricks himself for Barbara Walters. He arranged for Johnny Carson’s staff to foil Geller on The Tonight Show. “I’m just feeling very weak tonight,” Geller explained to Carson when he couldn’t perform anything supernatural.

In 1975, Randi published his first book, The Magic of Uri Geller, later retitled The Truth About Uri Geller. A series of lawsuits and countersuits between Randi and Geller ensued. Geller won a suit against Randi in a Japanese court, claiming Randi had defamed him, but the judge awarded Geller 500,000 yen, or just $2,000. Randi boasts that he has never paid a dime to anyone who has sued him.

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How I got out of writing an essay on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I recently re-read Wells’ The Time Machine, which made Justin Kahn’s How I got out of writing an essay on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that much more amusing:

January 17, 2005

I received the syllabus for my Humanities course. A humanities course should not be required for my B.Sc. degree in Physics. To add insult to injury, we are supposed to do an analysis of Wells’ The Time Machine. We are to focus on the historical context when the topic is time travel?

Who reads a book on a time machine for social insights? I would do anything to get out of this essay.

At dinner, my friends complained about this assignment. I tell them a way out: I will build a time machine.

They mocked me, but they will see.

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WHO warns of severe form of swine flu

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

WHO warns of severe form of swine flu:

Some countries are reporting that as many as 15 percent of patients hospitalized with the new H1N1 pandemic virus need intensive care, further straining already overburdened healthcare systems, WHO said in an update on the pandemic.

As many as 15 percent of patients hospitalized with the new H1N1 pandemic virus need intensive care. I’m not sure what exactly that means.

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Evernote Financials

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, shares some of the financials behind the company’s universal memory drawer:

Evernote, of course, is free. That’s important because the company, which does no advertising, needs to acquire customers as cheaply as possible. “Our product is our marketing,” Mr. Libin says.

In 18 months, 1.4 million people have tried the service. An additional 4,500 try it each day.

“Free is not a loss leader,” he says. “If we can get a small percentage of users to pay we start to make money.”

How many times has a venture capitalist heard that? But Mr. Libin showed that the magic is not only that it takes just a small percentage of customers to turn red ink into black, but also that the longer they remain customers, the more profitable they become.

About 75 percent of the customers walk away within the first four months. That’s not worrisome, because the revenue from Evernote’s 500,000 active users is growing faster than the growth in the customer base. How? Customers discover that they need more than the basic storage space or want some extra features, like the ability to scan PDF documents for a particular word. Evernote charges them $5 a month or $45 a year for these and other benefits.

Mr. Libin studied the behavior of the earliest adopters and found that the longer customers used the service, the more likely they were to start paying for it. About 0.5 percent convert to paying customers in the first month. But after about a year, 4 percent have converted. (He says he thinks the figure will top out at about 22 percent.)

It makes sense. The shoebox of data is more valuable to the customer as it becomes larger. In addition, compelling uses — like photographing those business cards — quickly eat up the monthly allotment of memory, inducing a person to start paying. The longer the customer stays, the more valuable he becomes.

The company gets about 3 cents of revenue for each active user in the first month of use, but after a year that same cohort of customers is providing 35 cents each.

Evernote made $79,000 from paying customers in July, Mr. Libin says.

That’s not enough to cover the cost of the engineers who design new features and the additional servers to store all the added data. But the cost of staffing doesn’t rise exponentially as more customers join, and the cost of adding storage declines because computing power keeps getting cheaper. (Electricity costs go up, but that is not a budget killer.)

The variable cost for each active user was about 50 cents a month when the company started, but has been dropping along a curve to 9 cents a month. By January 2011, Mr. Libin projects, the company will break even.

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